Lightbend Fast Data Platform Reaches General Availability

NEW YORK, Sept. 25, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightbend — the provider of the world's leading Reactive application development platform for building distributed systems — today at the O’Reilly Strata Data Conference announced general availability of the Lightbend Fast Data Platform, the first end-to-end platform that makes it easier for enterprises to design, build, and run streaming applications.

“To compete in the digital era, the necessity is rising for enterprises to use data faster. This need for speed is expanding beyond analytics to applications that adapt to changing conditions in real-time, personalize customer engagement, and power the internet of everything,” said Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend. “With our comprehensive application development and operations platform, enterprises can focus on building business value rather than stitching together streaming infrastructure.”

With the release of the Lightbend Fast Data Platform, enterprises can build and operationalize applications for different streaming use cases (faster ETL/legacy batch modernization, real-time personalization or decision making, and IoT) more easily, confidently and reliably. Designed by the team that created the Scala language and popular Reactive technologies like Akka and Play Framework -- Fast Data Platform delivers application responsiveness, resilience and elasticity (the hallmarks of Reactive) to streaming data use cases.

"As enterprises look for every opportunity to move at higher velocities, they are more frequently coming to the conclusion that the gap between their application development and analytics efforts is an inhibitor," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst, RedMonk. "With its Fast Data Platform, Lightbend intends to close the distance between application and data in enterprise architectures, improving the speed at which businesses can operate."

In a new global survey of more than 2,400 enterprise developers, Lightbend explored fast data adoption trends across three key areas — business value, use case, and technology. These early fast data adopters cited a range of key challenges for getting their data-driven applications shipped, including: choosing, integrating, and managing the right tools and techniques, writing robust and performant applications, and scaling / debugging / monitoring fast data systems.

Design Capabilities for Architects

Streaming applications impose a new set of challenges on architects and enterprises. Datasets are now never-ending. Jobs that process these datasets can run for months or years. Workloads often spike unpredictably but applications must always be responsive. Architects face critical choices, including:

picking the right streaming engines and machine learning libraries,

selecting robust deployment tooling, and

designing architectures that guarantee extreme resilience at scale.

Lightbend Fast Data platform offers a curated set of components, advice and assistance, so architects can make the choices that best fit their use cases, team and organization.

Easy On-Ramp for Developers

Developers want to build and launch performant applications quickly. This means they need to focus on business requirements, not on low-level tooling, infrastructure and integrations.

ready-to-use tooling that optimizes production performance and supports CI/CD.

Run-time Capabilities for Operators

Fast data applications, while game-changing at the business-level, can stretch Ops and DevOps teams. The emerging, interconnected technologies that make up these applications are difficult to monitor with legacy tools. Spiky workloads constantly test resilience. Relying on multiple vendors for support makes resolving issues painful.

Because Lightbend has helped companies build and run systems that serve billions of users reliably and at scale, Lightbend Fast Data Platform provides:

intelligent monitoring built for streaming fast data applications,

robust production tooling for extreme resilience at scale, and

peace of mind with one-stop support.

“In today’s fast-paced digital world, companies need to accelerate applications development using contemporary architectures and tools to keep up with the pace of business. Accenture Liquid Studios help companies build for change through new technologies, and we rapidly prototype and deliver software to help our clients enter new markets,” said Max Furmanov, Accenture Managing Director and Global Lead of Liquid Application Studios. “Through our alliance relationship with Lightbend, we help our clients achieve value by focusing on business outcomes and building solutions on Lightbend’s consolidated Fast Data Platform. The platform includes technology to build modern streaming applications and it’s already integrated so we can move quickly.“

About LightbendLightbend (Twitter: @Lightbend) provides the leading Reactive application development platform for building distributed systems. Based on a message-driven runtime, these distributed systems, which include microservices and streaming fast data applications, can effortlessly scale on multi-core and cloud architectures. Many of the most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with our platform, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world. For more information on Lightbend, visit: https://www.lightbend.com.